Inter Press Service (IPS) Africa invites you to participate in training on transboundary water governance in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and implications on national water policy and use, to be held during national water week in your country.

As politics, economies, conflicts and cultures become increasingly intertwined, will individual identities also begin to transcend national boundaries? The elusive nature of “global citizenship” was noted by Sri Lanka’s permanent representative to the United Nations, Dr. Palitha Kohona, at an IPS Forum on Global Citizenship on Nov. 18 at the Sri Lankan Permanent Mission to the United Nations in New York. “The concept of global citizenship has challenged the minds of humans for a very long time although its exact definition has never really crystallised,” Kohona said.

Ambassador Anwarul K. Chowdhury chaired the Forum on Nov. 18, 2014 in New York at the Permanent Mission of Sri Lanka to the United Nations. Credit: Roger Hamilton-Martin/IPS

A meeting of the IPS Core & Support Group was held for the first time in New York on November 17. It was motivated by the 50th anniversary of Inter Press Service, which was set up the same year (1964) as the Group of 77 – now counting 134 countries – and the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). The Permanent Mission of Sri Lanka to the UN hosted the meeting, reflecting the support Sri Lanka diplomats have extended to IPS over the years in different capacities and international fora within and outside the framework of the UN system.

December 1938 was a decisive month in human history: In Germany, the scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann discovered that when bombarded with neutrons, the atomic nucleus of uranium would split.

The discovery of nuclear fission laid the basis of nuclear technology with all its manifestations – in the short term, the most destructive weapon ever devised and used a few years later in the Second World War.

But God is fair, He unleashed a force of good at the same time: Back in 1938, nearly the same day that Otto Hahn publicised his discovery, a very special boy was born on the other side of the planet in Sri Lanka. His name: Jayantha Dhanapala. In the town of Pallekelle, which later became home to one of our monitoring stations – but to that later.

Jayantha Dhanapala was awarded the IPS International Achievement Award for Nuclear Disarmament on Nov. 17 at the United Nations in New York. Dhanapala, U.N. Under-Secretary-General for Disarmament Affairs until 2003, has remained committed to the goal of a nuclear weapons-free world since leaving his post, presiding since 2007 over the Nobel Prize-winning Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs.

“A nuclear weapon-free world can and must happen in my lifetime,” Dhanapala told attendees at an official ceremony sponsored by the Buddhist organisation Soka Gakkai International.